i
Once, not so long ago, a woman on the street told me my fortune. She said it was good news: I’d live a long life. I’d be happy. Bouncing babies, etc. I was past thirty by then, and I’d had these things on my mind. But there was a catch (well, isn’t there always?): You’ll never get your good, long life if you keep asking the wrong questions, the woman said. I wanted to know: Which question is the right question? She passed my fingers between her palms, my palms between her fingers. She said, Not that one. But I was only teasing her. I knew which question to ask.
ii
A suicide, they said. Nothing to suggest otherwise. If not a suicide, perhaps an accident. The steep cliff, the shifting rocks. When you see hoofprints in the forest, the authorities said. What would horses be doing in our forest, we wanted to know. Accidents happen all the time, the authorities said. We know you had nothing to do with this.
iii
I’ve found the authorities to be, in some matters, unreliable.
1
The man who drove me up the mountain in the first month of my sixteenth summer looked nothing like my father. He had thick black hair, a thick red neck, and a rosary wrapped around his rearview mirror, but instead of a cross, a miniature naked woman, whose breasts seemed not quite to scale, dangled from the coil of synthetic beads. She bobbed in the flow of the air vents, twisted and slapped two-dimensionally against the cheap black cab plastic, and I was reminded, again, of the shapes of women, the impossible geometry into which I was meant to fold myself. I couldn’t look at her for long. Not because of my own monstrous reflection, which I kept catching in the rearview—also not quite to scale, I thought—but because my stomach was weak in those days. Whenever the car hit a quick dip or banked a long curve, it felt as though parts of my body (throat, liver, one thick thigh) were left hovering, separated, while the rest plummeted, or swerved, or bumped, or whatever.
It was a long drive, our trajectory relentless. Even approaching the Levitation Center is an exercise in antigravity, people used to say, and it’s true: the Center was high enough in the mountains that I felt the air thin out long before I even saw the main building, with its paper-white stucco walls, its red-tipped roof, its enormous golden seal. The atmosphere loosened steadily as we drove; I could feel all that nice, thick sea-level air pooling at my ankles and then abandoning me, even through the churn of the air-conditioning.
In the end, I spent most of the ride staring at an amoebic mole on the back of the cabdriver’s neck. That was my mother’s wisdom: to combat motion sickness, look unwaveringly at something inside the car, something small and still. If it’s decidedly cancerous, dark purple, spreading out at the edges, no matter. Say nothing. Try not to move your eyes.
I know a lot of people who can’t remember themselves as teenagers. They look back and see only smoother, pinker versions of themselves, the actual feeling of those frantic years replaced by anecdote and snapshot. Oh, look, weren’t we babies, weren’t we thin, remember the time we, etc. We were so bad! We weren’t so bad. Who can say? Me, I can’t forget. I remember the girl from that summer as though she were sitting beside me: a fearful girl, but insatiable too, possessed of a fundamental savagery. Well. Can we blame her? It had only been a year since her father had disappeared.
As soon as I started to become nihilistic about my nausea, the cab crested through a final bend and pulled into a white sand driveway the size of a swimming pool. A woman was waiting there, wearing a white dress. She introduced herself as Magda and took my hand, as though she knew me. For a moment, I tried to pull away, but she held on tight, and I was unsteady enough in the thin air that I let her. By now, we were almost eight thousand feet up.
I was late, Magda told me. I was the last, the very last to arrive.
She led me across the driveway toward the Center’s main building. Paths lined with globular pink peonies scribbled out in the grass to either side, but we didn’t follow any of them. Instead we strode, hands linked, across the white expanse. The duffel bag on my shoulder felt heavy, much heavier than I remembered, and I wondered, briefly, if someone could have hidden something inside of it at the airport, when I wasn’t paying attention—a hard-packed pallet of powder, say, or a recording device, or the body of a small child. No, no. Don’t be silly. That’s not what this story is about. (Isn’t it?)
Magda began talking, pointing out all the different buildings, the different trails, listing the daily activities, the times I’d be expected for meditation and meals. I couldn’t follow any of it. Commissary, dormitory, promontory, bedtime story. I stumbled on a bright white rock; it sparked across the sand like a popping kernel. Magda only tightened her grip. She gave an overall impression of linen and salt. They say everyone faints at least once during their first week at the Center, before they acclimate to the altitude. (Altitude is a perfect word for itself, don’t you think, all peaks and valleys and places to slip.) But I’d been drinking steadily from my battered canteen, the one my father had given me years before at a place very much like this one, and so I didn’t fall. Besides, I was busy looking back over my shoulder.
Back over my shoulder, the wind had caught in the loose white sand of the driveway, and was coaxing it upward into a steamy funnel. A group of strange-looking girls, who had clearly been installed at the Center long enough for their heads to become utterly untethered from the old brown world down below, appeared as if from nowhere. They yipped and laughed and took turns running through the snow-white mini-twister, holding hands, shrieking like children at a water park, coming out the other side with thick white eyebrows and heavy white eyelashes and red, sand-scratched cheeks, an instant aging. Magda turned and called out to them and, after a few more furtive whoops and peals, they ran past us toward the main building, sand streaming off their bodies like water.
During most months of the year, the Levitation Center was a panspiritual contemplative community that held meditation retreats, organized talks by spiritual leaders of various lineages, and offered programs with names like “Intermediate Mindfulness Training” and “Open Sky Intensive” and “Walking the Path of Indestructible Wakefulness.” Its visitors practiced Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, among other things. Dowsing, psychology, iridology, judo, aikido, tae kwon do, oil painting, law, yoga, croquet, bodywork, vegetarianism, Reiki, piano, lucid dreaming, crystal healing, palm reading, gratitude, abstinence, tantric sex. The usual assortment of practices for people like these: people who are looking for something.
The Levitation Center wasn’t its real name, of course. That’s just what everyone called it. According to legend, it was the only bit of land left in America where levitation was still possible, at least for those with the correct set of aptitudes. They said there was something about the place—a balancing aura or geological phenomenon or holy spirit, depending on the they in question—that made it easier for anyone with the potential for levitation to achieve it. It was like one of those thin places you stumble across once in a while on sea-beaten cliffs or in toothy graveyards, where the ancient pagan Celts would have said heaven and earth nudged even closer than their usual three feet. Most people walking by would feel nothing. But a bare few might find room there, space for upward motion, for unfurling like paper.